Black Rock NV

September 2003

At XPRS this year, 2003, we had the best weather the Black Rock Desert has to offer. The XPRS event yielded three Tripoli altitude records:

Eric Pyne flew an HT K-240 to 13,040 feet to set the "K" hybrid mark.
Greg Fannin Flew an AT M-1315 to 27,294 feet to set the "M" single motor mark.
I (Mike Brest) flew an AT I-435 staging to an AT I-284 18,408 to feet to set the mark in the "J" Staged & Clustered category.

In an attempt to defend my "I" Extreme Altitude title from XPRS 2002, I flew my PML Cirrus Dart on an I-284. Prior to the flight, I had decided that this would be the last flight of this rocket since it had been through a lot and performed very well all the while. It even served as a booster for two flights in my first build attempt at taking the "J" staged altitude record. For this flight I decided to use motor ejection instead of my usual electronic ejection in an attempt to reduce weight and squeak out a little extra altitude. I used a new PerfectFlite altimeter to record altitude instead of the usual PML Co-pilot. Unfortunately I forgot one small detail in flight prep, the ejection charge. These three pictures show the results:

Yes, it flew very high. And I was right it was the last flight! :-(

In the arena of cool rockets not entering contests, Paul Sutchek take the cake in my opinion with his "Mega Buck Rogers", a 9-motor cluster rocket doing the traditional air-start sequence backwards. In this video clip you can see that he lights his four outboard J-350s first, followed by the four outer H-180s mounted around the final motor, the central K-550. Here is the video.